NASA has released new enhanced color images of Pluto that mark the highest resolution photos of the planet yet, according to Sci-News. The images combine those taken from the New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) prior to its approach of the planet on July 14 with the color data gained from the Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera.
The LORRI images capture a mosaic of the shoreline of the Sputnik Planum, all the way across its icy plains to the northwestern al-Idrisi mountains, the "badlands" of the northwest of Sputnik that make up the central area of the dwarf planet, according to The Verge.
"The mountains bordering Sputnik Planum are absolutely stunning at this resolution," said John Spencer of the New Horizons team. "The new details revealed here, particularly the crumpled ridges in the rubbly material surrounding several of the mountains, reinforce our earlier impression that the mountains are huge ice blocks that have been jostled and tumbled and somehow transported to their present locations."
In addition to the mosaic, they also released a high-resolution image of the heart-shaped area referred to as Tombaugh Regio, which shows a punctured terrain that contains many pits that most likely formed through the fracturing and evaporation process of ice.
"Nothing of this quality was available for Venus or Mars until decades after their first flybys; yet at Pluto we're there already - down among the craters, mountains and ice fields - less than five months after flyby," said Alan Stern, New Horizons' principal investigator. "The science we can do with these images is simply unbelievable."
